Alex Shaffer goes from the mat to the movies

Al Alexander

Friday

Mar 25, 2011 at 12:01 AMMar 25, 2011 at 8:21 PM

To say the acting bug has bitten Alex Shaffer is a bit of an understatement. Only a year ago he was a 119-pound state wrestling champion from New Jersey. Now, 12 months later, he’s on a whirlwind tour of the United States and Canada promoting his first movie, a wrestling picture titled “Win Win,” in which he plays – what else? – a high school wrestling phenom.

To say the acting bug has bitten Alex Shaffer is a bit of an understatement.

Only a year ago he was a 119-pound state wrestling champion from New Jersey. Now, 12 months later, he’s on a whirlwind tour of the United States and Canada promoting his first movie, a wrestling picture titled “Win Win,” in which he plays – what else? – a high school wrestling phenom.

It’s art imitating life to the nth degree, and it’s completely changed life’s path for the outgoing 17-year-old, who is passing up numerous scholarship offers to pursue a full-time career in acting. He has secured an agent in addition to signing up for acting class. He’s even planning a move to California in August. Whether a star, or a monster, is born remains to be seen, but it’s hard not to be impressed by the kid’s charming combination of drive and bright-eyed optimism while sitting down with him in Boston to talk about “Win Win,” a movie he flat steals from his Oscar-nominated co-stars, Paul Giamatti and Amy Ryan.

“I’m just going to ignore the whole idea of the starving actor,” he said when asked if he was prepared for the possibility of failure. “I’m just going to keep auditioning until I get a part.”

At least he’s one up on 90 percent of his peers, having a major motion picture already on his resume. But I doubt he’ll ever find another role as perfectly suited to him as Kyle, a teenage runaway from Ohio who flees his drug-addicted mother (Melanie Lynskey) to come to New Jersey in search of the grandfather (Burt Young) he’s never met. His quest eventually leads him to Giamatti’s Mike Flaherty, an attorney and part-time wrestling coach who invites the kid into his home for dubious reasons, not the least of which is to exploit the youngster’s talents in hopes of reversing the fortunes of his doormat team.

Shaffer said he never would have known about the casting call writer-director Tom McCarthy was holding in New York if a fellow wrestler at Hunterdon Central High School hadn’t urged him to try out. It turned out to be an experience that both Shaffer and McCarthy will never forget.

“He liked the look I had,” Shaffer said of McCarthy, who also wrote and directed the Oscar-nominated “The Visitor.”

“The first day I came in, there were like three other wrestlers in the room. They all had buzz cuts, their varsity jackets on, and I came in and I had, like, a purple flannel on, red pajama pants, and I had bleached-blond hair. And he just kind of liked the surfer, like, stoner look, I guess.

“The only reason my hair was bleached was because it was something the entire team did before a big match. I was going to dye it purple, but the night of the regional finals, Tom called me and said, ‘Don’t cut your hair, don’t turn it purple, you’ve got the part.’ So I was like, ‘Oh, sweet.’ A week later, I won state and the next day I was on set filming the movie. So it was a really weird experience.” McCarthy said selecting Shaffer was pretty much a no-brainer, but he still put the budding child star through at least seven more auditions before finally casting him.

“We saw a lot of boys, but we narrowed it down pretty quickly,” he said. “Alex just really stuck out. He wasn’t competing with anyone but himself, but he didn’t know that. I feel guilty having him and his parents come in so many times, but I had to do due diligence to the film, the studio and myself. If that young man’s performance doesn’t work, the movie is going down.” Still, it wasn’t always a smooth transition from the mat to the set, McCarthy said.

“He took a lot of work,” he said of Shaffer. “It was not easy. He had never acted before, and we put him through the grinder. But he’s a hard worker and has a strong constitution and an amazing work ethic. He was very committed.”

Shaffer said he received a lot of help from the people he least expected – his co-stars.

“They treated me with a lot of respect,” Shaffer said, “and to be honest with you, it really wasn’t something I was expecting because of my perception of what acting is and how actors are like. I thought they were mostly rude, and weren’t going to be so nice. And everybody was just great from the first time I sat and read the script with them until the last day on the set.” From that point on, he said he was hooked, much to the chagrin of the dozens of college recruiters hoping to convince him to come and wrestle for them. Shaffer said they stood little or no chance even if he hadn’t fallen in love with acting.

“I was never interested in school, or anything, but I would get all of these recruiting letters from these top-notch colleges and I would never send anything back,” said Shaffer, who went undefeated in winning the state title in his sophomore year. “They’d say, like, ‘Go online and fill out the form and send it to us.’ Never! I never sent anything back.” Recruiters aren’t the only ones after Shaffer, so are the girls, all eager to claim they’re dating a Hollywood star.

“After the movie trailer came out, I had to have gotten like 10 to 15 texts from the fakest girls in the world,” he said with a laugh. “‘Alex, haven’t seen you in three months. I miss you so much. I haven’t talked to you much until now, but I’m not being fake or anything.’ So, I just don’t care. I know who my best friends are.” Yup, he just might make it in Hollywood, after all.

Reach Al Alexander at aalexander@ledger.com.

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